Stewart Muir

Stewart Muir is founder and executive director of the Resource Works Society, a Vancouver-based group open to participation by British Columbians from all walks of life who are concerned about their future economic opportunities. He is an author, journalist and historian with experience on three continents including a financial editor of The Vancouver Sun responsible for mining and markets coverage. Since Resource Works was established in 2014, the group has gained international recognition for its practical approach to the public challenges of responsible natural resource development and use.

The BC Greens, who hold the balance of power in the province’s Legislature, have revealed just how contemptuously they view resource people, and how little they understand the basis of Canadian prosperity.

Canada and British Columbia are “resource colonies” according to BC Greens deputy Adam Olsen, supplying the world with raw resources.

Speaking in the BC’s legislature, the MLA for Saanich North and the Islands described the Trans Mountain pipeline twinning this way: “some would have us chase Kinder Morgan to the bottom of the barrel,” claiming the project “does almost nothing to build sustainable, well-paying jobs in our province.”

Olsen, one of the three-member BC Green caucus, appears hell bent on using the party’s extraordinarily powerful position as leverage to denigrate and destroy one of the world’s most successful, innovative and sustainable resource economies.

What is commencing in BC politics is a travesty with devastating consequences.

A British Columbia resource job contributes up to fives times the per capita GDP of an average job, and the resource industry is the nation’s most powerful driver of innovation as Resource Works has shown in its research over the past four years. BC protects significantly more land from development than UN recommendations, and successfully sustains a diversified economy that in recent years led Canada in overall economic health.

As we’ve shown, a healthy resource economy generates more jobs in Metro Vancouver than elsewhere in the province.

The Trans Mountain project is federally approved because of the jobs that it will create, because of the better price it enables for Canadian natural resources in export markets, and because of the importance to the whole country’s economic health.

Losing our resources jobs will hurt Canada’s climate agenda and drag down the country. Lost prosperity is never good for the environment, which the BC Greens claim to want to protect.

The Green dogma on display shows the lengths this influential group is willing to go to denigrate resource people and unwind the generations of success that have made Canada the envy of the world – a place with dynamic and diverse cities together with a rural resource base that fuels prosperity for all.

Resource Works needs your support – please consider a donation to support our work in calling truth to power when reckless politicians like Adam Olsen and the BC Greens mutilate the truth and disrespect hundreds of thousands of resource people.

A $50, $100 contribution will allow us to maintain our research programs, hire summer students, and continue to monitor the damage that rhetoric like that described here is causing.